The Thoughts of a Spiderweb
May 26, 2017 6:23 PM   Subscribe

Web thoughts Spiders appear to offload cognitive tasks to their webs, making them one of a number of species with a mind that isn’t fully confined within the head.
posted by dhruva (8 comments total) 29 users marked this as a favorite
 
An orb spider waits on a column made of the gutted corpses of long-ago prey.

That's what my place has been missing
posted by Countess Elena at 6:34 PM on May 26, 2017 [12 favorites]


SOME PIG
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 7:33 PM on May 26, 2017 [9 favorites]


quite interesting to read about current conversations in spider science. My background in behavior analysis puts me mostly in the camp of "Webs are extensions of bodies" not "Webs are extensions of minds" - and I agree that the definition of cognition used by the researchers seems pretty low bar.
“The brain doesn’t have to know how to move this floppy arm,” Cheng said. Rather, the arm knows how to move the arm.
Am I understanding this correctly to mean that the nerve impulse to activate the muscles didn't originate from the brain, but rather from some other neurons? I really don't know enough about neurons to know if this is special enough.
posted by rebent at 7:55 PM on May 26, 2017 [2 favorites]


Harvard Design Magazine: The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard

Notes to a Project on Citizen Kane : thoughts that apply to Google Earth and paracosms generally.

Sematectonic stigmergy
: anthills and termite mounds.
posted by 0rison at 10:18 PM on May 26, 2017 [2 favorites]


"Am I understanding this correctly to mean that the nerve impulse to activate the muscles didn't originate from the brain, but rather from some other neurons? I really don't know enough about neurons to know if this is special enough."

That's correct. (This is all casual knowledge from just liking to read about octopodes, I'm no expert!) It's hard to know how an octopus thinks, because it's so different from how we do -- it's the only invertebrate to have such a high level of intelligence, and our intelligence is so deeply connected to our brain-and-spinal-cord vertebrate model it's hard to understand exactly how an octopus works. But their brain is the size of a walnut and each of their 8 arms has a bundle of neurons in it that works like a brain and works independently of their brain-brain. The arm can work when the neural pathways are severed from the brain, or even for a little while after the octopus is dead and the arms have been cut off. Each arm goes exploring on its own, looking for food and threats and other interesting things, and only alerts the brain if it needs particular attention or help from another arm. (The brain seems to have to be looking at the arm it wants to consciously manipulate, which is a bit of a limitation when you have 2 eyes and 8 arms.) Squid and cuttlefish don't have arm-brains, just brain-brains, and their arms can't wander around independently like octopus arms can.

So we have something a little bit like this -- vertebrates have something called a reflex arc. When the doctor hits your knee with her hammer, you can't stop yourself from kicking, because the impulse doesn't go to your brain. We have most of our neurons in our brains, but we carry a small amount in our spine, and reflex arcs refer to the spinal neurons. She hits your knee, your spine says "KICK!", and your brain doesn't get involved until after the entire transaction has happened. Nerves transmit relatively slowly as these things go, so there's a big advantage to transmitting certain reflexes just to the spine and back, instead of waiting for it to go up the spine to the brain and then back down. When you accidentally touch a hot pot, you snatch your hand back due to a reflex arc that sends an immediate signal to your hand that that was VERY BAD (hand to spine to hand). It takes another second or so for the impulse to get to your brain, and back to your hand, that that FUCKING HURT, and that's when the burn starts feeling like shit, a moment after you've already removed it. That's not because it takes a minute for the burn to start; that's because it takes a minute for your brain to get in on the party and realize it hurts. But the reflex arc action is the difference between a minor burn and major damage -- if you had to wait for your brain to figure out you were being burned, you'd be a lot more burned.

Being an octopus might be a little bit like having super-sophisticated reflex arcs, so that instead of just snatching your hand away from a hot pot, you could make your whole stew with one hand thinking by itself, and it would only alert your brain when it needed your brain to taste the stew or to get the other arm to grab some more thyme. Otherwise it'd just go on cooking without your brain being particularly the wiser. But it's hard to know, since all our models of cognition are brain-and-spinal-cord, and octopuses are, you know, NOT.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 11:30 PM on May 26, 2017 [63 favorites]


The main illustration deserves notice of its own. Artist.
posted by amtho at 3:15 AM on May 27, 2017 [3 favorites]


Eyebrows McGee: flagged as fantastic. That was brilliant. <3
posted by ZakDaddy at 7:20 AM on May 27, 2017 [1 favorite]


This is why I love Metafilter.

Fantastic article, with wonderful bleeding edge research and thought provoking questions about how little we know about the universe.
posted by NeoRothbardian at 7:32 PM on May 27, 2017 [1 favorite]


« Older More like a DONK   |   Music scholar Katya Deve explores the history and... Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments